


Your Heart in its Loyalty

by reine_des_corbeaux



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017)
Genre: Introspection, M/M, Memory Related, Post-Canon, Shamelessly Pretentious Literary Allusions, Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:08:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28128132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reine_des_corbeaux/pseuds/reine_des_corbeaux
Summary: Summer loves don't always survive in the snow.
Relationships: Oliver/Elio Perlman
Comments: 14
Kudos: 27
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Your Heart in its Loyalty

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Roxie Ann (pluvial_poetry)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pluvial_poetry/gifts).



It snowed intermittently through dinner, as the darkness fell. Inside, though, fire and candles and electric light suffused the room with a golden glow. To Elio, the glow had a coolness behind it, as though the warmth went only skin deep. If he were to peel back the paint or the wallpaper or the wainscotting, he thinks he’d find a thin layer of ice lurking there, creeping under wood and paste and suffusing the house with frost. 

But no one else seemed to notice the cold, or at least they didn’t in the way he did. Dinner came with chatter and warm light, and of course, with discussion of Oliver’s news. Elio put up with it. He’d always been good at smiling and nodding in agreement, and if his parents could see the upset in his face, they didn’t mention it. Their silence was merciful, understanding, letting the dinner conversation tread its own merry rings around the table as it always did. Feasting and festivity to mark the darkest part of winter. Candles gleaming, halfway lit in the menorah. A house, lived-in and living for present and past, marked with memories in every room. He could play his part, but the past would always sit in the shadows, in the doorframe and the corner of his eyes 

And so, after it all, Elio went outside. Slipping into the hallway and shrugging on his coat, he walked out into the snow, and held his hands up to catch the flakes that descended from the sky. It had been snowing all afternoon, and even now, in the night’s full darkness, the snow came shawling out of the sky in fat and drowsy flakes. Only the wind whistling in empty trees carried its noise with it in this, the longest winter night. 

Elio knelt down in the snow, the frozen grass poking at his knees under its coating of snow. That was the thing with snow, or perhaps with any beautiful thing: there was always sharpness lurking underneath the softness. Always the frost, after the summer. The night sky was a closed book, the stars hooded and unreadable, the moon shrouded in grey-purple clouds above. Elio bent down to scoop up a handful of snow. 

“Elio,” he whispered to the night, as he had into the phone, prayerful and sorrowful and so lonely that it hurt him to speak. But this time, no “Oliver'' returned. Only the empty silence of night, punctured only by the last irrelevant echoes of a bell. 

The snow in his hands began to melt. 

It was never going to have been anything more than a summer fling. Elio had always known that in his heart. Theirs had been a love for warmer months and sunnier climes. And wasn’t there something Shakespearean, something sonnet-like in that? (Never mind that Shakespeare had never been his favorite. Never mind that Elio would always be more musician than poet). But even so, even if their love had been fragile, and as transient as snowflakes, wasn’t that a good thing to remember? Wasn’t that all fine and lovely, and wasn’t the memory of it alone beautiful and warm enough to keep out the winter’s chill? 

Carefully, Elio stretched himself out on the wintery ground, feeling the bite of frost and frozen grass and snow-covered twigs even through his heavy coat. The sky above was still grey, and the snow still fell like feathers from an old quilt. The world was silent, dark, and swirling all around him, and he could think to do anything but remember. 

There had been a moment in the hotel before the end of all things that Elio thought he’d treasure more than anything else from that lovely, doomed holiday. More than shouting his own name to the waterfall and the echoing rocks of the Dolomites, more than dancing drunk through quiet streets with Oliver, feeling young and alive in their own immortal love. 

Sex was always a little fraught between them, in a way that sex had never been fraught for Elio before. There was always a little fumbling, a hurried eagerness to connect that sometimes left teeth clashing, or a clumsiness of movement, but that clumsiness melted away like summer heat more often than not. And so it had been that day, as Elio wrapped his arms around Oliver’s neck and pulled him down atop him. And in that way, everything blurred in their moments of connection, of lips on skin and of breath, joined and shared between two mouths. In the moment, they were one body, one soul. _OliverElioOliver_. Names were whispered as a litany between them, every word a kiss, and every gasp and moan a sort of name in and of itself. 

Afterwards, lying in bed together, with their legs tangled, Elio’s head on Oliver’s chest, Oliver’s hand in Elio’s hair. If they could have stayed connected forever, Elio gladly would have, in the warmth and sweat of the little room, already smelling half familiar and half foreign, sex hazy in the air around them. 

_(Half familiar and half foreign, Elio thought in the now-time and the sharp smell of winter. Was that all he and Oliver were destined to come to? Well, it could have been worse, he supposed. Could’ve been a hotel room in Brussels and a revolver and two lifetimes of pain, art cut off from one altogether.)_

He’d leaned into Oliver’s shoulder, and in a moment of darkness, perhaps brought on by the late afternoon shadows dancing in through the gaps in the shutters, he’d remembered the story, the rain, is-it-better-to-speak-or-to-die, and everything that it had led to. 

“It ends badly, you know.” 

“What ends badly?” Oliver stroked a curl of Elio’s hair, twisting it around his index finger. 

“The story, with the knight and the lady. The one where the knight wanted to know if it was better to speak or to die. The lady the knight loves fears his passions, runs away from them, joins a convent, and is relieved when he dies.” 

“That’s morbid.” 

“That’s the sixteenth century for you.” 

Oliver laughed at that, and let his hand slip down Elio’s cheek, caressing his face. Elio leaned further into his shoulder. Oliver smelled of sun and sweat and summer, warm and alive. For a moment, Elio let himself imagine a world where this wasn’t going to end in only a few days’ times. Except it wasn’t an imaginary world then. It was a reality for them both, a hope for the future, and Elio hoped Oliver felt the same in this moment. Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t, but he pulled Elio closer, and the light through the windows sent long and honeyed beams across the room, soft and glittering. In that evening, they’d been gilded. 

But in the cold of now, Elio opened his eyes and watched the snow swirl in ways that the light never had. The snow around him was blueish in the darkness, though not so blue as it would’ve been under moonlight. And for a moment, this time a moment he knew was imaginary, Elio thought he could see Oliver. An Oliver of frost and snow, all wrong and walking past him on his way to some life without Elio. 

_Every great artist has their heartbreak. They turn it into novels and music, distilling it into scenes of lilacs and shores and summer walks at dusk. Things lose their mystique after a few years’ distance, and after ten or twenty, pain becomes art. Recollection transforms into a monument of pages or notes. Life rebuilds on empty pages._

It was supposed to be a comforting thought, but Elio wasn’t sure that it comforted him. Maybe it did and maybe it didn’t. But the thought remained all the same, haunting him and dancing in the slippery winter air around him. And Elio didn’t want to wait ten or twenty years, not when his heart still felt rubbed raw, the end of summer coming in the depths of winter for a second time. But he’d grow. He’d remember this night and that summer for the rest of his life. Carefully, Elio stood and brushed off the snow as best he could. He turned. The house gleamed, and with it, the future, with its pain, and its possibility glowed too. 

Oliver’s voice echoed in his ears as the breeze picked up, swirling the snow, and Elio walked back to the door. Summer loves didn’t last the winter, but the winter always ends. And Elio had a lifetime of summers ahead of him. A lifetime of connections, and maybe, just maybe, one of them would be Oliver once again, smiling and summer golden, calling out his own name. 

**Author's Note:**

> The title is pulled from the tenth tale of the _Heptameron_ , that of Amadour and Florida, from which "is it better to speak or to die?" is also pulled in canon. This is the same story Elio and Oliver discuss in this fic. (Other literary references include a rather vague one to Sonnet 18, and a rather more heavy-handed one to the disastrous love affair between poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud).


End file.
